Immigrants and Health Care: Mounting Problems

Immigrants have made the United States what it is today, a mix of ethnically diverse people struggling to make a new life in a new land. In recent decades, immigration from Latin America and Asia has overtaken the European immigration of earlier generations. Soon, most children in the United States will be of Latin American or Asian descent. As our nation becomes more ethnically diverse, much of our national attention has focused on immigration, particularly regarding the debate about universal health care. The recent passage of Proposition 187 in California, which eliminated all public services except emergency health care for undocumented immigrants, is a good example of this. Concerns about the added burden of care and the draining of already-depleted resources stem from a general assumption that immigrants negatively affect the health and welfare of our society. Before we can accept this assumption, we must closely examine current health and demographic trends among the largest and most recently arrived groups of immigrants, namely, those from Latin America and Asia.

If we were to look into a crystal ball at the future U.S. population, the picture would look similar to that in California today. California is the leading state of residence [1, 2] for authorized and unauthorized immigrant populations. Demographic experts [3] have projected that by the year 2030 only one third of all children in California will be of European descent.

Figures from the Census Bureau [1] confirm that since 1970 only 2.7% of the 15 million immigrants who came to the United States were European. The proportion of total foreign-born persons from Latin America and Asia increased from less than 1.5% each in 1900 to 43% and 25%, respectively, in 1990. The estimated total undocumented immigrant population residing in the United States was 3.4 million in 1992 and growing …